I had a little surprise for Mother and everyone else. A surprise that would ensure that my birthday party was talked about and remembered for ages to come. I hugged my secret to me. I would get into awful trouble but I didn’t care. I really didn’t. I’d had enough of this attitude of ‘live and let live – but not in my neighbourhood’. It wasn’t that I thought I was better than everyone else or anything, but someone had to start somewhere, show them all what hypocrites they were.
So why not now?
And why not me?
twenty-eight. Callum
‘Ryan, this isn’t the way to change things. Alex Luther, for instance . . .’
‘Alex Luther, my left buttock!’
‘Ryan, language!’ Mum told him off.
‘Meggie, get real!’ Dad said impatiently. ‘Alex Luther is barely living, just about breathing proof that trying to change the way it is by using peaceful methods doesn’t work. That blanker has been in prison more times than any eight prison governors I know.’
‘Don’t call him that,’ Mum said furiously. ‘It’s bad enough when ignorant Crosses call us blankers without us calling ourselves by the same name.’
‘We name it, we claim it,’ said Dad.
‘Nonsense! We use it, Crosses think they can too. Besides, that’s not my point. Alex Luther is a great man . . .’
‘I’m not saying he isn’t, but the General is making more of an impact than Alex Luther.’
‘And if my granny had wheels she’d be a wagon!’ Mum snorted.
‘What’s your point? The General is . . .’
‘A warmonger!’ Mum’s tone made it very clear what she thought of the General, the anonymous head of the Liberation Militia. ‘Killing and maiming always make more of an impression than peaceful protests and sit-ins and passive resistance, but that doesn’t make it right.’
‘The General . . .’
‘I don’t want to hear one more word about the General. You talk about him as if he were God’s brother or something.’
‘As head of the L.M., he’s the next best thing . . .’ Dad replied.
In response, Mum used a series of words I’d never heard her say before. I left her and Dad arguing about the General versus Alex Luther and crept down the stairs. Weren’t the two of them ever going to sleep? I’d already been waiting half an hour for them to give up and shut up. How many times had they had the same argument? No-one ever won. It just made them mad at each other. What was the point?
I glanced up at the clock in our living room. Two-thirty in the morning. Earlier, Sephy had left her usual message that she wanted to talk to me urgently. We had a secret signal. She’d phone three times, each time letting the phone ring twice before calling off. That way she didn’t have to talk to anyone or let my mum and dad or Jude know that she was phoning. Of course the phone ringing then stopping drove Mum and Dad nuts but the trick was not to do it too often. If I needed to get hold of her urgently, I did the same thing, although it was more tricky phoning during the day because one of Sephy’s house servants usually picked it up pretty quickly. Once I heard the signal, I knew Sephy would phone me between two-thirty and three in the morning – whenever it was safe for her to sneak out of her room and use one of the phones in her house. When I phoned her with our signal, we’d usually meet in her rose garden around the same time of night. So here I was, hovering over our one and only phone like a vulture, waiting for the first brrrr to sound so that I could pick it up before it disturbed everyone else in the house.
Quarter to three came and went, as did three o’clock. At five past three I decided that Sephy was obviously not going to call me. Maybe it’d just been too difficult to get to a phone. I was heading up the stairs when the first trill sounded. I’ve never moved so fast. But even then a full brrrrrr rang out before I could pick up the receiver.
‘Callum?’
‘Shush!’ I whispered. I anxiously looked up the darkened stairs, listening intently for the sound of a bedroom door opening. Moments passed. Nothing.
‘Sephy?’
‘Sorry I’m late, but Mum came down ten minutes ago and she’s only just gone back upstairs.’
‘That’s OK.’
Sephy’s voice barely made it to a whisper, the same as mine. I was standing in our living room talking to my best friend in the pitch dark. It made it feel adventurous and illicit somehow.
‘Callum . . .’
‘I’m glad you phoned.’ I got in first. ‘What lessons do we have tomorrow?’
‘Double Maths, then History. English, P.E., I.T. and Music in the afternoon. Where’s your timetable?’
‘I left it at school,’ I replied softly. And then something Sephy had said sunk in. ‘Oh no, not History!’
‘What’s wrong with History?’
‘Mr Jason,’ I said grimly. ‘He’s going to use the lesson to stick it to me the way he always does.’
‘What’re you talking about?’
‘If you don’t know then I can’t tell you,’ I said.
Silence stretched between us.
‘You still there, Sephy?’
‘Yes, I’m still here,’ Sephy replied.
‘So why did you want to talk to me?’ I asked. ‘What was so urgent?’
‘What’re you doing on the twenty-seventh of September, that’s two weeks on Saturday?’
I frowned into the darkness. ‘Nothing as far as I know. Why?’
‘D’you want
